Silkroad online 2 review 20157/28/2023 There was an Icelandic prosecutor present-Tarbell was mildly distracted by how attractive she was, with her fitted skirt, secretary glasses, and hair in a bun-and an attaché from the US embassy. Tarbell had been to the island nation once before and knew some of the officials at the meeting. This was what the team had been waiting for: a misconfiguration somewhere on the site that revealed the real IP address of Silk Road, which Tarbell proceeded to trace all the way to the state-of-the-art facility in Iceland. He showed it to fellow agent Ilhwan Yum and to Tom Kiernan, the civilian computer technician who formed the technical backbone of the cybersquad. On June 5, 2013, after staring at IP addresses for hours, Tarbell pasted one of them-193.107.86.49-into a browser and suddenly there it was: the Silk Road Captcha field. He entered usernames with bad passwords (and vice versa) and pasted data into input fields-all the while using regular old freeware to analyze network traffic and collect the IPs communicating with his machine. Tarbell threw data at Silk Road, hoping to see the leak. He had let down his guard, confidently telling colleagues that the site would never be found. Silk Road’s success was making DPR arrogant. Dread Pirate Roberts (or DPR, as he was often called) had been alerted to the problem by a user but ignored the warning. His lucky break came from a thread on Reddit: A user posted a warning that Silk Road’s IP address was “leaking”-visible to other computers. His investigation had started entirely at his desk with virtual gumshoe diligence, poking around Tor’s IP publishing protocol and spending time on Silk Road looking for chatter about the site’s security. Silk Road had eluded law enforcement for almost three years because it ran on Tor, a kind of cryptographic camouflage that made it nearly impossible to see the site’s users, vendors, or servers. Once on the ground in Reykjavik, Tarbell and the lawyers met with their counterparts and explained why they’d come. Really puts you in your place, Tarbell thought. One of the attorneys told Tarbell about Iceland’s tectonic forces-the North American and Eurasian plates, slowly tearing open a growing chasm. Beneath the surrounding ocean are the massive cables that make the country an important location for web traffic the island is nearly equidistant between North American and Europe, and its forbidding geography and climate reduce cooling costs and provide free geothermal power. Down below they could see Iceland’s fierce geology, all jutting rock built up from the water by volcanoes. But in the midst of this enormous law enforcement effort-mostly fruitless so far-Tarbell and CY2 had found the first promising lead in the case.Ĭybercrime agents spend a lot of time at their desks, and it was exciting to be in the field. The other agencies had dismissed the FBI, partly because of interagency bluster and partly because the traditional agents who thought casework was all guns and grime and grit had no respect for the eggheads from cybercrime. Tarbell and his team-known as Cyber Squad 2 (or CY2 for short and “the Deuce” for fun)-were relative newcomers to the case. Silk Road investigations had been launched by Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and the DEA office in Baltimore, where an agent named Carl Force had been working an undercover identity as a Silk Road smuggler for more than a year. They’d been working on this case for months, as had federal agents across the country, in a wide-ranging digital manhunt for Dread Pirate Roberts: the mysterious proprietor of Silk Road, a clandestine online marketplace that functioned like an anonymous Amazon for criminal goods and services. Thor was the home of a computer with a very important IP address, one that Tarbell and his FBI colleagues had discovered back in New York-the hidden server for a vast online criminal enterprise called Silk Road. That’s why Tarbell and two US attorneys had come all this way. And just beyond that, perched on the edge of a moss-covered lava field: the massive matte-white box that housed the Thor Data Center. On approach to Keflavík International Airport, he could now see the city of Reykjavik coming into view. Chris Tarbell, a special agent from the New York FBI office, was in a window seat, watching a green anomaly in a sea of blue as it resolved into Iceland’s severe, beautiful landscape.
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